RANCHER LABS: CRO LEVEL 1

Architectural Best Practices

Unit 1.1.3

© 2020, Rancher Labs, Inc. All rights reserved. 1

 RANCHER LABS: CRO LEVEL 1

Architectural Best Practices

These are some of the things that you can do to help ensure that your
Rancher Server installation runs smoothly and with minimal issues.

1. Run the Rancher Server on a separate node from all Kubernetes

workloads. If running it within a Kubernetes cluster, use an RKE
cluster that is dedicated to the Rancher Server processes.
2. Run Rancher in HA in production.
3. Use a Layer 4 load balancer in front of the Rancher Server, passing
TCP through on 80 and 443. Do not do SSL termination on the load
balancer.
4. Run the server infrastructure in a region with the Kubernetes
clusters it manages, or if it manages clusters in multiple regions,
position it in a central location. Run it on reliable, flexible
infrastructure, such as instances in EC2 or GCP.
5. The Rancher Server cluster can run three nodes, each with all
three roles (etcd, controlplane, worker). Downstream production
clusters can combine etcd and controlplane or can separate them,
running a separate set of nodes for each role.
6. If using the Authorized Cluster Endpoint with downstream clusters,
create a Layer 4 load balancer with an FQDN that load balances
traffic across nodes with the controlplane role.

References
Architecture Recommendations -
https://rancher.com/docs/rancher/v2.x/en/overview/architecture-
recommendations/

© 2020, Rancher Labs, Inc. All rights reserved. 2